The Alt-Ac Job Beat Newsletter Post 18

I recently re-started an X account, and have a LinkedIn and personal blog as well. I think in terms of the short form content, LinkedIn/X, it is worth spending a few minutes to promote your work a few times a week. It can just be "hey I did this paper check it out", you should not be spending that much time crafting the content. I try to post semi-technical things (and not the vapid self-help stuff), but honestly that probably does not matter all that much. It is a slow process to put material out and build up followers.

The long form stuff is a bit of a different calculus. Those are often projects I am working on, or things I intentionally want the Crime De-Coder sites to come up for in search results. It is very hit or miss though, personal blog one of my most popular posts is using python to download google streetview imagery. Personal blog is more like a nerd journal than anything.

So having a website I think is important to post your work/portfolio, and sharing that work on social media is a simple additional step. Don't spend too much time on it though.

JOBS

Interesting new positions on the job board include:

DBA INSTEAD OF LLC

So Glen Mills in response to last months newsletter about the LLC mentioned an alternative, a "Doing Business As" license. It is cheaper and can get you all the same EIN/DUNs stuff. Different states have different costs for the LLC (North Carolina is $200). For folks doing data analysis type consulting this is fine, and the "LL" part of the LLC is probably not necessary.

EXAMPLE SCIENTIST

Michelle Teaford Wojcik, PhD in CJ from Cincinnati, is a Sr. UX Researcher at AnswerLab. I do not overlap much with UX researchers, so take my description with a grain of salt, but much of it seems very similar to qualitative work people do (more focus groups than surveys).

TECH TIP

So many entry level books on data science and python use Jupyter notebooks -- I very much dislike notebooks, and they tend to promote bad coding practices. If you want a nice report at the end of your analysis, I suggest to check out Quarto. Quarto you write in plain text and have blocks (and can use R or python). I have a few different Quarto examples here, my word template and the YAML I used for the python book.

Best, Andy Wheeler